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Lots of Sprouters are prepar­ing to make their own organic veg­etable gar­dens and I’m so inspired by their enthusiasm!!!

Here’s an impor­tant tip to save you time, stress and money when it comes to get­ting started.

I’ve men­tioned before the suc­cess of your gar­den will largely rely on the qual­ity of your soil. Under­stand­ably that knowl­edge can lead to frus­tra­tion and con­fu­sion since hey, if you’re like 90% of the planet, your soil is ter­ri­ble; either sand or clay.

Instead of rush­ing out and buy­ing in top­soil, which can cost you hun­dreds of dol­lars and prob­a­bly end up with dis­ap­point­ing results any­way, it’s best to make your own. But before I tell you how you can do that (in an after­noon!) here’s a sober­ing story about topsoil.

I was involved with a com­mu­nity gar­den where they bought soil from a local land­scape sup­plier to fill the new raised beds. Unfor­tu­nately the soil barely had any nutri­ents or lit­tle micro-organisms and basi­cally resulted in very sad, slow and bug-prone crops.

They spent a lot of cash and it set them back a grow­ing season.

So instead of buy­ing in soil, here’s my favourite method to ensure your garden’s success.

It’s called “no-dig” gar­den­ing and it’s hands down the best way to make your garden.

The basic process of build­ing up your soil is to layer car­bon, and then nitro­gen, then car­bon, then nitro­gen into a big ol’ pile and then plant into it. It’s also known as the ‘lasagne’ method. And I love it. I built all my beds that way.

• For the nitro­gen lay­ers, you can use the weeds or grass clip­pings from your prop­erty; prune some trees and pull off the leaves to use those; even pee into a bot­tle and pour that on; get some chicken manure to sprin­kle around. Or get your sons to take aim. They’d love that, I’m sure. Basi­cally any­thing that is green (or bright yel­low!) will work as your nitro­gen layer.
• For the car­bon you can use card­board or news­pa­per first, to smother the grass, and then buy your­self a cou­ple of bales of hay or bags of sugar cane mulch. Or, you could do what my part­ner did in the city and rake up the dead fallen leaves that were decom­pos­ing on the road in front of his house.

The cost? Gor­geous bicep mus­cles that would look good on you too.

Keep lay­er­ing car­bon then nitro­gen for about 6–8 lay­ers in total.

Use a hose to water in each layer. To really get things mov­ing, add some plain old molasses from the store (about two table­spoons) into a water­ing can of water and pour that on too.

The more organic mat­ter you can use, the more quan­tity and rich your soil will end up. Basi­cally, you are build­ing a huge com­post pile that will allow you to start plant­ing pretty much right away, instead of hav­ing to wait months or years to improve your soil. Fin­ish with a layer of mulch (my favourite is hay) and you’re ready for the next step.

Your gor­geous new bed will be tak­ing shape, it just needs plants!

Next, you ide­ally want to have some qual­ity home-made com­post to put into holes where you’ll plant your seedlings. But if you don’t have your own com­post ready to go, you can pick it up from the nurs­ery or some hard­ware stores these days by the bag.

Hon­estly, I haven’t had as good results with store bought com­post, because it doesn’t have lit­tle micro-organisms run­ning around in it to help feed my plants, but it is a great way to get you going.

So, pull apart the mulch and make a lit­tle hole in the lay­ers, then drop in about three hand­fuls of com­post into the hole. Gen­tly take your seedling out of its pun­net, care­ful not to crush its lit­tle stem, and plant it in the com­post. It’s best to plant shal­low rooted plants for the first sea­son. Pull the mulch back around, but only so it’s about 3cm away from the plant. You don’t want it to be touch­ing, or else it will rot.

There you have it. A veg­gie patch in less time than it took to watch an episode of Ellen Degeneres.

In the com­ments below, I want to hear if you’ve used the ‘no-dig’ method before, and if so, what were your results?

Come and check out ‘The Abun­dant Veg­gie Patch Sys­tem’. This season’s launch video is pretty cute.

I show you step-by-step how to set up and main­tain your organic gar­den in my acclaimed online course ‘The Abun­dant Veg­gie Patch Sys­tem” and this week I’m launch­ing the course again!! I’m doing things a bit dif­fer­ently this time, so come on over and see what I mean.

Thanks as always, for read­ing and I can’t wait to help you set up your own abun­dant, low-maintenance organic veg­gie patch.

 

Love,
Nicola